JJ says: George Haire was a coach, reporter and friend

I have had my most prized material possession for less than a month. Since Oct. 8, 2017 when the Tubbs fire swept through my Santa Rosa home –destroying a lifetime of memorabilia, not to mention my 49ers jacket – I have not put too much importance on material things, although it is amazing how much “stuff” I have accumulated over the past five or six years.

But my signed Tom Seaver baseball card is super, super special. On the back of the card is a ticket stub from the Aug. 4, 1985 Major League game between the Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees. Baseball historians might recognize the date as the one on which Seaver won his 300th Major League game.

That bit of trivia in itself makes the card package important, but the real significance to me is how I obtained this gem of sports history. It was given to me by a super, super special human being. George Haire was at that game. He paid $8.25 for the ticket to enter Yankee Stadium.

George died Jan. 18 at age 86, but not before giving me the baseball card, ticket stub and a collection of his sports stories, many of them written for the Argus-Courier.

His passing is a loss not only to me, but to every young person who plays sports in Petaluma. For more than a decade George was a part-time sports writer for the Petaluma Argus-Courier. During that decade-plus, he made many friends among coaches and players in all sports.

Journalism wasn’t George’s chosen profession. As you can read in the story of his life as prepared by his family on page B2 of this paper, or online at Petaluma360, he was first and foremost a coach, teacher and athletic director.

George literally walked into my life. He showed up at the Argus office (back in the good ol’ days when we actually had an office) and asked simply, “You need any help?”

That simple question sparked an hour-long conversation that ended with me asking one of my own: “Can you put two complete sentences together?”

As it turned out, George had a pretty good grasp of the written word and an even better grasp of sports.

As the weeks became months and the months years, George not only became a helper and a coworker, but also a friend. He would do anything to help. He would volunteer for assignments, travel almost anywhere and do it all with a zeal that reflected his love for kids and sports. He wasn’t above covering Little League games and would connive to convince his wife Judi to accompany him to Elk Grove in the heat of summer.

He knew more about most sports than I will ever know, and he and I had many conversations about sports, coaches and athletes that are too confidential even to be found in a president’s basement.

George’s knowledge of sports did not extend to volleyball, but when his granddaughter became a player, George discovered the game and became the volleyball expert for the Argus-Courier, learning about the game until he could describe it and its players in detail.

He loved girls sports, and one of the highlights for him was the yearly pilgrimage to the East Bay for the West Coast Jamboree girls basketball tournament. He would study for hours to find a way to cover Petaluma and Casa Grande playing in different divisions in different cities in one day trip.

Perhaps he learned it during his coaching days, but George was an astute observer of human nature and would often offer me spot-on opinions of coaches and players that would explain their actions on and off the playing fields.

All this tells how important George was to me, and how much he meant to the community. It does not tell what a decent, kind and, perhaps most notably, genuine person he was. With George, what you saw was what you got. He was easy to talk with, easy to like and fun to be around.

He could be critical in his reporting, if he thought it was warranted, but he was never mean or purposefully hurtful. He would often consult me to make sure he had not written something that could be taken the wrong way.

I don’t know if George would have given you the shirt off his back, but I do know he loaned me the vehicle out of his driveway when mine burned.

The community lost a good man and I lost a good friend when George moved on to coach and write on a higher level.

(Contact John Jackson at johnie.jackson@arguscourier.com)